Chris of Arabia's photostream  

A few short days and my visit to a part of the world I've never spent time in begins. It's taken me 50 years to get there, but I've never once set foot in the US, and I'd have never expected starting with somewhere in Texas. I'm off to Austin for the annual SXSW Music, Film & Interactive festival. A true voyage of discovery. See you all from the far side. Keeping it weird...

Oh, and some music courtesy of Mr. Kravitz - Are You Gonna Go My Way?

I may hide this later, but you never know. This is how Step inside... started life. I don't think I'm giving any secrets away with the following:

1) Duplicate the base layer
2) Add a Gaussian Blur to the duplicate at around 25%
3) Add a layer mask to the same layer and using a large soft round brush set on 30% opacity, brush away the blur around the distant part of the corridor.
4) Add some contrast using a curves layer
6) Add a Kim Klassen texture layer ('Mustard Seed' I think) on a multipy blend mode, with the opacity at around 80%
6) Convert to a b&w image using the Channel Mixer on the default 'Green' filter
7) Add another curves layer and use the 'velviaesque' setting from Petteri Sulonen's blog article Simulating Film Effects With Curves - this gives the toned effect
8) Save the PSD
9) Flatten the layers, then reduce down to 1024px on the longest side
10) Use Unsharp Mask on Amount = 90%, Radius = 0.9, Threshold = 4 levels
11) Save as a JPG on the highest quality setting and upload here

I like 5* hotels. Will you join me? Your room is just down the end of the corridor. Uneasy you say?

Today I went to the local races - the stadium is just a little way across the road from where I live over here. From a photographic perspective, I didn't find it overly inspiring, truth be told, but I rather liked this chap sitting there all on his lonesome - he wandered off moment later, must have been something I said....

I often wonder what impact I have on other people. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, maybe not at all